Forget napalm – President Wimp loves the smell of coffee in the morning

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

Kilgore liked the music of Richard Wagner, because it “scares the
shit out of the slopes.” Obama prefers Marvin Gaye.

Instead of President Macho, we’ve got President Wimp – or so we
are led to believe.

Obama’s so-called #LatteSalute has come in for much criticism, a sign
that such a man is unfit to lead America into yet another war. If
only we had a Colonel Kilgore, John McCain or Mitt Romney in
charge – or a modern-day John Wayne! Hell, yeah - he’d kick IS’s
butt alright and show those jihadists not to mess with Uncle Sam!

But in many ways, the image of the president with the coffee cup
is perfect for what US imperialism needs at present. It’s fully
in line with the non-macho, or even wimpish image of Obama, the
reluctant warrior, the man who would prefer to spend his time
trying to hit birdies on the golf course, or listening to Marvin
Gaye on his iPod, rather than getting involved in yet another
Middle East conflict.This image counts for quite a lot in selling
US foreign policy and getting support for it in Western Europe.

Here we must give credit where its due, even if it’s through
gritted teeth: US imperialism has a genius for reinventing
itself. After the Bush years, the Empire desperately needed a new
kind of front man. The trouble with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and co
was that they were too obvious, too easy to protest against, too
similar to Colonel Kilgore in their obvious love of war and
conquest.

The hardcore fanatical neo-cons cheered them on, but the more
intelligent imperialists realized that they had done great damage
to the cause of Pax Americana, and that a new kind of president
was needed to extend US global hegemony and take things on to the
next stage. One who would talk the language of dialogue and
negotiation and stress the need for the US to act multilaterally,
someone who would talk of a “new beginning between the United
States and Muslims around the world,” but who would still,
like Bush, carry on with the Permanent War agenda.

I remember the first time I saw Barack Obama on American TV in
2006. It was hard not be impressed. He spoke of his opposition to
the Iraq war, maintaining that it was the “wrong war.”
He came over as personable, articulate and sophisticated. He was
a throwback to the sort of Democrats we had in the 1960s and
’70s. A stark contrast to that clapped-out catastrophe George W.
Bush.

Hillary ‘The Hawk’ Clinton was the favorite to beat Obama in the
race for the Democratic nomination, but the smart money was on
the more “doveish” senator from Illinois.

The great thing about Obama from the viewpoint of the more
intelligent US imperialists was that he could regain liberal-left
support for Pax Americana, and help reduce the widespread
anti-Americanism in the west which had grown in the Bush years to
record levels. He would be able to rebuild bridges with Europe.

He was, in short, the sort of president that pro-American western
liberal-leftists – who had fallen out of love with the Imperial
power in the Bush years – craved. The fact that he had a real
chance of becoming America’s first black president, in a country
where legalized racial segregation had existed in the not-too
distant past and where black people still faced racism, only
increased his appeal. The Guardian
reported on the enthusiastic reception the presidential
hopeful received in Berlin in the summer of 2008:

“Again and again he uttered sentences that could never have
come from the mouth of George W. Bush, and Berlin could not have
been more grateful.”

Liberals and many progressives were euphoric when Obama made it
to the White House, and believed a new era was dawning.

Anyone who predicted amid the euphoria of November 2008 that the
self-same Obama, the critic of the Iraq war, would lead Americans
into even more military conflicts, would have been dismissed as a
hopeless cynic and an “anti-American obsessive.” But so it has
proved.

This week’s attacks on Islamic State positions in Syria mean that
Obama has bombed no less than seven different countries in six
years. All this comes from a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in
2009. There’s been a new Cold War too, to go with the hot ones.
The man who promised a “reset” in relations with Russia has taken
his country and other western nations into a new economic trade
war with Moscow after the US engineered, along with the EU, a
highly provocative regime change in a country bordering Russia.

Yet still the image persists of a president who is reluctant to
go to war, or to cause too much trouble. Part of that is due to
Obama’s preference to let others take the front seat on foreign
policy.

In Libya, it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who made the
running and who tastelessly gloated over the brutal killing of
Muammar Gaddafi when “regime change” was achieved.

In Ukraine, it was the State Department’s Victoria Nuland who
handed out the cookies to the Maidan protesters and who discussed who should and shouldn’t be in the
government with the US Ambassador.

On Syria, it’s been neocon politicians and pundits and the
pro-Israel lobby who have been pushing tirelessly for US military
action to remove President Bashar Assad and his government to
break the Damascus/Tehran/Hezbollah alliance. When it looked like
they were finally going to get what they wanted, last summer
Obama backed down on airstrikes after the UK parliament voted
‘No’ and Russia came up with a face-saving plan.

Neocons may call him a ‘wimp’, but The President Who Would Rather
Play Golf is exactly what the Empire has needed over the past few
years. It has needed a front man who doesn’t appear to like war,
but who nevertheless keeps on coming back for more. He’s someone
who talks the language of peace and conflict resolution, and not
interfering in other nations’ affairs, but who still works, like
presidents before him, to enforce “regime change” on governments
that the US elite wants toppled. Those who believed

Obama would be radically different to Bush showed a breathtaking
naivety regarding the power of the US military-industrial complex
and the huge influence that the pro-Israel lobby, Saudi Arabia,
and the Arab oil states have on US foreign policy.

Even if he had really wanted to “stop the war,” Obama would have
been unable to do so as he’s no more than the pilot of an
imperial juggernaut whose controls have already been set, and
which purposely has no reverse gear.

As bad as he’s been from an anti-war viewpoint, the really
depressing thing is that there were, and are, no better
alternatives – as the system simply won’t allow it.

If you’re anti-war, would you really have preferred Mitt Romney
to Obama in 2012? Criticism of Obama has been muted because of
the sheer awfulness of the alternatives to him. If we didn’t get
President Obama in 2008, we’d have had President McCain.And who
would also want to line up with those reactionaries who attack
Obama on racial grounds, or who peddle the “Barack Osama –
he’s a secret Muslim” line?

There’s also the fact that the man, in spite of his foreign
policy, still remains hard to dislike on a personal basis. That
too helps the Empire, and it wouldn’t have applied had the
obnoxious McCain or smarmy Romney got elected.

Those who think things will improve from an anti-war viewpoint
post-Obama are likely to be cruelly disappointed. The face and
even the gender of the president may change, but the policies
will stay more or less the same.

Already the uber-hawks are rubbing their hands with glee at the
prospect of President Hillary Clinton, who they’re sure will be
more outwardly aggressive in foreign policy, and who will push
the cause of Israel in the Middle East even more forcefully than
Obama. She’ll probably face a pro-war Republican candidate in an
election in which the military-industrial complex and big
business simply can’t lose because both candidates will do what
is required of them if they win. Anyone who might pose a
challenge to the system, from either the genuine left, or the
antiwar libertarian right, won’t get the required funding from
Wall Street, and in any case will be portrayed as a “dangerous
extremist” or “fanatic” by establishment gatekeepers.

It’s a sorry state of affairs which tells us much about the lack
of genuine democracy in the US in the early 21st century. The
election of a man like Gerald Ford, who took over the presidency
following Nixon’s impeachment and was hailed as America’s
“greatest president” by the leftist antiwar writer
Alexander Cockburn, or even Jimmy Carter, is now all but
impossible – such figures wouldn’t make it through the filter
system that weeds out candidates who won’t do more or less
exactly what the military-industrial complex and the powerful
lobbies want.

So as the bombs rain down on Syria and Iraq (again), it’s worth
bearing in mind that the president with the #LatteSalute is
probably the least worst we can get without radical, systemic
change of the entire American political system.

Whether the public persona is President Wimp or President Macho,
it doesn’t really make too much difference. We get warmongering
policies to keep Colonel Kilgore happy, whatever happens.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.